Interaction

Oct. 19, 2005

Shaping the Humanities

Participants in a new Humanities Center workshop called "Global Justice," from right: Ina Shen,
Jon Dolle, Amita Chudgar and Joan Berry. Photo: L.A. Cicero

The people at the Stanford Humanities Center apparently didn't get the memo about humanists working alone amid dusty books, devoting years of their lives to writing tomes no one reads. But then again, few humanists have gotten that memo, though belief in its existence persists. The problem-solving crowd and some humanists themselves may have prescribed a definitional overhaul for the field, but at least on this campus, the excitement is palpable and the boundaries eminently flexible. The humanities—ask anyone—are fun.

They're also profoundly interdisciplinary. Back in 1999, historian Keith Baker—at the time director of the Humanities Center and later the associate dean for humanities—organized a broad-ranging series of conferences devoted to "The Shape of the Humanities." It was clear that much of the work in the humanities defied disciplinary description, though it's also true that the disciplines themselves were beginning to defy description. So the all-star lineup of scholars and critics participating in the conferences debated the meaning of such terms as "history," "literature," "culture" and "interdisciplinarity" (http://shc.stanford.edu/shc/1998-1999/events/soh3.html).

The very fact that there was such a meeting, however, points to a kind of uncertainty, whose origin may lie elsewhere than in the humanities themselves. When Ralph Hexter, dean of the College of Letters and Science and dean of arts and humanities at the University of California-Berkeley, announced last year that he was leaving to become president of Hampshire College, he made it clear that though the positive reasons for taking such a job were obvious, he was also concerned about the humanities' increasingly marginal place at large research universities such as Cal (http://insidehighered.com/careers/2005/04/18/hexter).

When schools reconsider liberal education, their core curriculum or breadth requirements, they often are debating what to do with the humanities. It is not unusual to hear that applied research often trumps basic research or, as Humanities Center Director John Bender puts it, problem-solving trumps curiosity. And, getting back to the piles of dusty books, the humanities has never had very good press. Scientific breakthroughs make headlines; new ways of thinking usually do not.

David Katzenstein, professor (research) of medicine and graduate student Adam Rosenblatt. Photo L.A. Cicero

Further, area studies, in the minds of many scholars, may supplant the traditional humanities disciplines—a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whom you ask. Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California, last spring announced the death of "English" and expressed hope that the death of the Modern Language Association would soon follow (http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/09/halberstam). The degree to which fields such as cultural studies are new or simply are places in which disciplinary scholars gather to contribute their particular perspective—the degree, in other words, to which a field is interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary—is still under discussion, and the discussion is more than a semantic quibble, considering the funding at stake.

At Stanford, funding for multidisciplinary research and education is squarely on the agenda. Though some members of the humanities faculty suggest they did not feel entirely welcome in the process leading up to the announcement of the multidisciplinary initiatives in international relations, the environment, bioscience and the arts—which will constitute the axes of the upcoming capital campaign—those same people affirm their enthusiasm for collaborating.

Debra Satz, faculty coordiantor of the workshop and director of th Ethics in Society Program. Photo L.A. Cicero

For example, there are two Humanities and International Studies Fellows at the Humanities Center this year, the result of collaboration between Bender, a professor in the English Department, and Coit Blacker, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the axis of the international initiative launched in May by President John Hennessy. Bender has pointed to the wealth of scholarship in the humanities in and about foreign languages as another obvious point of collaboration, particularly given the frequent laments that few U.S. government officials speak anything other than English. The Stanford Institute for the Environment, the anchor of the multidisciplinary environmental initiative, and the Humanities Center are planning a conference on humanities and the environment for 2006. Links with the incipient arts initiative, which will concentrate on creativity, are even easier to devise. As Bender points out frequently, the humanities are "key to the multidisciplinary campaign." It's not just a matter of the humanities folks crossing the street; there are plenty of reasons why the rest of the university should make its way to the center on Santa Teresa Street.

The Humanities Center has three basic missions: fellowships, public events and interdisciplinary workshops. All three reflect

the elastic nature of the humanities, the excitement of working in areas whose boundaries are up for grabs. Fellows are both internal and external (http://shc.stanford.edu/fellowships/index.htm). Public events include conferences, the university's Presidential Lectures series and endowed lectures, many of which are available on audio and video streams. Most of the public lectures are aimed at a broad, interdisciplinary audience: "The purpose is to show the public what scholarship produces," says the center's outgoing associate director, Elizabeth Wahl.

Helen Stacy, a senior lecturer in law Photo L.A. Cicero

But the workshops are where the heavy lifting takes place, the site where definitions and concepts get tested, where cross-disciplinary friendships are forged, where fellows, faculty, graduate students and visitors teach each other how to think in interdisciplinary ways.

"The point of the workshops is to bring people together," says Wahl. "With the right incentives and the means and the time, the kind of scholarship that workshops can develop is quite phenomenal. We're giving people tools."

The range of subject matter covered by the workshops is indicative of the reconfiguration of the humanities in recent years, what anthropologist Clifford Geertz—who is a frequent point of reference for historians and literary critics—called "blurred genres." The topics are, quite literally, all over the map. They embrace history, policy, creativity, language, science and identity. They also come and go, reflecting, Baker says, the ebb and flow of intellectual trends, people and energy. Wahl says, for instance that she was trying to line up a workshop in a couple of years taking art history as its starting point; a particular fellow slated to be at the center, matched with a particular faculty member, with maybe the right number of ripe graduate students thrown in, might just result in the right mix for a successful few years of intellectual exploration. As opportunities appear and disappear, a particular workshop may continue, but the content shifts slightly each time.

"Sometimes we don't have the right fit," Wahl says. "The workshops point out where the crust is thin."

For the past decade, the workshops have been funded by two five-year grants from the Mellon Foundation. The second of the two grants is now entering its last year. (The rest of the Humanities Center's activities are funded by the university and by its own endowment, the latter covering 80 percent.) To take the place of the Mellon grants, the center has obtained a one-time 1:1 Mellon matching grant of $1 million and a $600,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant with a 4:1 match (http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/february9/neh-020905.html). The center's staff has raised almost $1 million and is confident the workshops will be around for quite some time.

Each year the center sees 15 workshops; organizers must reapply for renewal at the end of the year. Among those held during 2004-05 were newcomers, old favorites and one that morphed into another. Some led to spinoffs, some had participants from outside the university and one was formally linked to similar efforts at other universities.

Probably the oldest of the bunch is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's Philosophical Reading Group (PRG). Its origins speak to the Humanities Center's role as a catalyst for experimentation. Gumbrecht, the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature in three literature departments, launched a reading group soon after he arrived at Stanford in 1989.

"Everyone told me it would never fly, so I said, 'OK, that's my problem,'" Gumbrecht recalls.

It flew. The group eventually grew into one of the Mellon workshops at the Humanities Center where, as it happens, renowned philosopher Richard Rorty was a fellow several years back. Rorty, in turn, brought in more philosophers (to balance out the literary critics), and the resulting mix helped launch the Philosophy and Literature program, whose founders, Josh Landy (French and Italian) and Lanier Anderson (Philosophy), met in Gumbrecht's group.

Every year, Gumbrecht chooses a modern philosopher whose works the group will discuss. This year it will be Schopenhauer. Last fall the subject was Hans Jonas, an Israeli philosopher especially concerned with technology, and in winter they moved to Erwin Schrödinger, a theoretical physicist. The members—faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and outsiders—meet weekly during fall and winter quarters, and in spring they hold a two-day colloquium at which members and guests make presentations about the year's readings.

"PRG is completely open," Gumbrecht said recently. "We have freshmen, outsiders, academics, a guy from Silicon Valley. It's crazy, but very productive. Yet our approach is very conservative." It's not for weaklings, he warns: "There's no protection for youngsters."

One of those youngsters is Kenny Gundle, a senior in human biology whom Gumbrecht met at Stanford's center in Kyoto, Japan. "We fell in love, intellectually," Gumbrecht explains. Gundle, who plans to be a physician, seems genuinely exhilarated at the intellectual challenge of the group. He was one of the speakers at the spring 2005 colloquium.

The text-driven discussions are intense and often very long, but members swear by them. Gumbrecht calls them a "lifeline."

"The text becomes the medium for different interpretations," he says. "The text takes care of ensuring it is interdisciplinary. Jonas, for example, was brand-new to everyone in different ways. Some concepts are new to some people but not to others, and we all have to use the language of the text. So people from human biology and doctors and software designers and philosophers all come together around this text. By all referring to the text, we make this explosion possible. I have to think via the Silicon Valley guy."

The Silicon Valley guy is Niklas Damiris, a one-time Stanford postdoc and physicist who turned into an ecological economist.

"The real reason for the multidisciplinary character of the group has to do with its history and sedimentation," Damiris said in an e-mail. "Year after year, a core group of interested people with different backgrounds have become mutually inspired to return for more intense intellectual interaction. This is not due solely to the members' diverse backgrounds but to their commitment to study texts rich enough to sustain divergent and often polemical readings."

And, he added, he and his partner, also a scientist, take pleasure in thinking that their presence may have inspired humanists to tackle more scientific texts.

Thus the PRG model of concentrating on a text, while in some ways conservative, forces participants to be more interdisciplinary.

"How Do Identities Matter?" led by Paula Moya, director of the undergraduate program at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, also mixes text readings with presentations.

In fact, when a speaker had to cancel in May, Moya and her workshop colleague Monica McDermott, a sociologist, decided on the spot to turn the session into a book group: "I know—let's read the Mary Waters book!" Moya said, referring to a recent study of West Indian immigrants in New York City.

Like the PRG, the Identities workshop started off as something else. Moya is a member of the Future of Minority Studies National Research Project, which itself grew out of discussions among friends at several Midwestern and New York universities about identity and pedagogy. Conversations led to conferences, which led to more conferences, which led Moya to think she wanted to create something at Stanford "that would be an interdisciplinary space for people to get together to talk about how identities matter." At the same time, it would hook Stanford into this debate on a national level.

The obviously gifted teacher got her obviously efficient graduate students involved (there is a graduate student coordinator stipend of $1,800 a year per workshop), and the effort was launched in fall 2003. Presentation and discussion topics have included "Disability as Masquerade" (by Tobin Siebers of the University of Michigan), a presentation on "Mark Twain's Lynching Narratives" by Lisa Arellano (a graduate student in modern thought and literature) and a talk by Ramón Saldívar, Moya's colleague in the English Department, called "Between Texas and Japan: Idioms of Race, Nation and Identity."

Moya, whose "postpositivist realist" work on racial and gender identity has won national attention, was intent upon making the workshop a place where the humanities meet the social sciences. And indeed they have met, often to puzzlement and hilarity. For example, there was the time the literary critics matter-of-factly talked about something called "the political effects of poetic form" and the sociologists practically headed for the door. The critics, in turn, were stunned to learn about the nitty-gritty of data collection.

"People often say, 'I have no idea what you're talking about,'" McDermott says. "Your most basic methodological assumptions are called into question."

Saying she had recently been asked to fill in for a speaker at a conference on public opinion surveys, she notes that her approach to research has been altered as a result of two years of listening to literary critics.

"I pay closer attention to symbols and particular interpretations I give to social interactions and dialogue," she says. "It has made me a better field researcher."

McDermott gave a presentation to the workshop in May on her field research, which was set to began this fall. She planned to lead a basically undercover existence in a Southern town as she held down a day job and investigated the impact on black/white relations of the skyrocketing numbers of Mexican and Mexican American immigrants.

Her audience at the workshop, a mix of literature faculty and graduate students from both literature and sociology, questioned her carefully about the racial makeup of the area, her methodology and her sources. With whom should she speak? How much should local newspapers be taken into account? How should she interpret the terms used by the locals to refer to Mexicans?

The workshops, as Wahl says, show where the crust is thin. At least two last year—"The Ecology of Globalization" and "Ethics in the Professions," both in their first year—did not apply for renewal, but their themes will reappear in new guises and under new rubrics.

"Ethics in the Professions" was coordinated by Lawrence Quill, associate director of the Center on Ethics. The center organizes a multitude of events on and off campus concerning ethics and society. Topics addressed in his workshop included pedagogy, business ethics, leadership, electronic voting, bioethics and ecology. The session on ecology, in spring quarter, featured Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, professors of religion at Bucknell University and founders of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Harvard (http://environment.harvard.edu/religion).

Tucker began by noting the critical juncture at which we and our planet have arrived, which has driven the sciences to say, "The human matters."

Many of the two dozen faculty members and graduate students at the noontime meeting—from religious studies, education, medicine, the university administration, earth sciences, anthropology and the Aurora Forum—were indeed concerned about how to establish viable links between religion and ecology, between academics and religious leaders, between an ethical vocabulary and a scientific one. Because, as Tucker said, "science is finally saying, the facts alone are not changing the situation," there is a remarkable opportunity for an interdisciplinary dialogue. Religious leaders who never before entered a public arena other than their own temples are finding themselves personally moved by the spectacle of an endangered planet and are being spurred into action, she said. "You bring them into the interdisciplinary dialogue, and the questions get reframed," she said.

This year Quill has organized a new Humanities Center workshop called "Global Justice." The faculty coordinator will be Debra Satz, chair of the Philosophy Department and director of the Ethics in Society Program. Participating faculty will come from philosophy, law, political science, education, history and economics.

Another workshop, "American Cultures," is on a one-year hiatus this year while faculty coordinator Gavin Jones runs the English Department's graduate program. "I hope people will miss it," he says.

In its fourth year, American Cultures is another example of ebb and flow. In the early 1980s, just as the Humanities Center was getting off the ground, there was an Americanist reading group whose members were drawn from several Bay Area universities. Art historian Wanda Corn remembers it as being a lively gathering; they had a little bit of money to buy books, and historians and literary and art critics would meet regularly over refreshments to debate, taking turns leading the discussions. The money ran out and the group dissolved, but American Studies revived it, adding in graduate (and some undergraduate) students. But that, too, declined, and then Jones and the Humanities Center came to the rescue.

Jones was an internal fellow at the Humanities Center, and he decided to revive the group with a new name that reflected his broad interests. According to the workshop's webpage, "'American Cultures' challenges isolationist intellectual boundaries at various levels—departmental, institutional, methodological, generational, cultural, and national. … The American Cultures workshop is not investigating a particular topic so much as it confronts the question of 'interdisciplinarity' itself, as it relates to the exploration of a national culture." The group generally combines panels, book discussions, presentations by graduate students and lectures by visitors. The fields include history, English, American studies, modern thought and literature, art history, music and anthropology.

In another example of the center's synergy, external fellow Jonathan Holloway of Yale University took American Cultures as a vehicle for spinning off a project, a conference called "The Routes of Black Studies" (http://shc.stanford.edu/events/TheRoutesofBlackStudies.htm).

There had been some problems in the past when Humanities Center fellows organized conferences, Wahl says, so at first she and Bender were skeptical. But Wahl says she thought there were real possibilities with the American Cultures workshop. "I said, let's do it—it's a perfect fit!" The conference was held at the center on May 13.

Moya's workshop also hooked up with a spring quarter conference, in this case "Realism in the World," a project of the Future of Minority Studies National Research Project (described by Moya as "interinstitutional, interdisciplinary, multigenerational and international") co-sponsored by the Humanities Center and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Young scholars from seven universities spent the day engaging with and critiquing prevailing theories of racial and sexual identity, often using Moya's own work as their point of reference to criticize postmodernist essentialist visions of identity.

If the workshops work, it's because they bring people together, as Wahl says, and because they set off a chain reaction of intellectual events or are themselves spinoffs from prior cross-disciplinary encounters. Conferences (such as the Construction of Meaning workshop's annual "Semantics Fest"), one-day colloquia, spinoff programs and meetings, and the newly redesigned workshops that succeed their progenitors are all signs that something healthy is bubbling in the Humanities Center. The title of the 25th-reunion conference last week—"Knowledge and Belief"—says it all (http://shc.stanford.edu/events/KnowledgeandBelief-Statement.htm). And so do the humanities.